Corporate loyalty no longer exists, faith in the hierarchy and bureaucracy is dead, and the distressed employee is replacing the company man. What's a manager to do? Learn the seven essential changes that will help you become a powerful leader.

This chapter is from the book

Chapter 1: HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!

For millions of workers around the world, the old gung-ho is gone. They talk
and mutter and gripe about their frustrations at work. You don't even have
to listen carefully to hear workers complain about managers, to hear managers
complain about workers, and to hear both complain about the company. More than a
decade of trying to run leaner and meaner has resulted mostly in
meanness, making a shambles out of company loyalty of workers and throwing a
blanket of distrust over every boss.

The complaints of most workers are usually about the boss, the infighting,
the lack of support, and the boring tasks and restrictive rules and policies. A
local beer-company employee expressed the pain, "It's just a job now,
just a job. It used to be fun. When you made deliveries, you were the
'Pabst man or the Schlitz man,' and it made you proud. Now it's
dog-eat-dog. The only things that anyone cares about are volume and money."

If you want loyalty, get a dog.
Anonymous

Corporate loyalty no longer exists, faith in the hierarchy and bureaucracy is
dead, the distressed employee is replacing the company man, and most
organizations are experiencing difficulty in implementing quality improvement
programs, simultaneous engineering systems, teams, and an assortment of
strategic planning initiatives. The challenge of the decade is how to lead an
organization of people who feel abused, feel confused, and don't want to
follow.

What's happening? Alan Wolfe, a contemporary philosopher, passionately
asserts that America, and other cultures as well, have become
"decentered." Not only is life changing, which makes once-appropriate
theories and ideals less relevant, but also the changes themselves do not seem
to fit any recognizable pattern. Decentering means, simply, that the world
around us is losing the center that holds it together and makes sense of living.
We are living in a quandary.

Out-of-Sync Systems

Sometimes it seems like the whole world of work is out of whack. The company
has one agenda, the worker has another, and the manager usually can't
figure out either one. Company policies and procedures get in the way of doing
the work in the most efficient manner. Core competencies are not in accord with
changing customer needs. Everyone except the worker is defining the way in which
work is to be done. Someone always seems to be restructuring someone else.
Quality improvement usually ends up meaning doing more, faster, instead of doing
less, more profitably. And no one seems sure anymore about what kind of
"self-direction" will be rewarded and what will be criticized.

Living in a Quandary

Diversity, complexity, and contradiction surround us on every side. We are in
the continual predicament of trying to get organized. The consequence,
especially in the workplace, is an uneasy state of perplexity and doubt.
Quandaries lead to a quagmire of anxiety and confusion. Inside each of us is a
gnawing concern about how to handle daily decisions. Rapidly changing conditions
and repeated chaos undermine our confidence in what we should think and do. The
toll on all of us is heavy, but on managers and administrators who are supposed
to be clarifying the situation and pointing the way, the burden is exceptionally
damaging.

Confusion at Work

The number one difficulty of effective management today is confusion in the
workplace. Following Wolfe's analysis, it is clear that the complexities of
living in organizations mean that old patterns of social life and old
expectations about how one will live one's life at work are replaced, not
by new patterns and expectations, but by incoherence and ambiguity. This
grappling with puzzling, bewildering, and knotty situations is illustrated
perceptively by conversations with a wide range of managers. Listen in on one
such discussion:

"How are things going here at Wonderful American Products
International?" (Any similarity between this name and an actual company is
a one-in-a-million long shot.) "Pretty good, thanks."
"What's the mission of this company?" "PEP, PEP, and more
PEP!" "What does PEP mean?" "PEP stands for Productivity,
Efficiency, and Profits." "One of the PEP boys, huh?" (Bad
comment, no laughter; in fact, not even a smile.) "Those sound like fairly
mainstream goals. So what's the problem?" (Asked in a redeeming tone
of voice.) "The people I manage are dumber than dirtat least they act
like it. They couldn't care less about productivity, efficiency, and
profits, especially profits." (This particular comment seemed to be quite
amusing to the other managers.) "Frankly, our
be-nice-to-employees-and-they-will-be-nice-to-you management approach
hasn't been very effective. They don't trust us, and, truthfully, I
don't trust them." "Empowering first-line managers to make
decisions and develop a few strategic planning initiatives has led to almost
total chaos and was a huge and costly mistake."

Wishing to change the subject a little, we asked, "How is employee
morale?" A manager in the midst (or should that be mist?) said, "They
are good people. They do their work and get their jobs done." Over his
shoulder another manager commented, "You know, I really don't know how
they feel. All right, I guess." Leaning against a machine, a third manager
urged, "Why don't you go and ask them?"

As a matter of fact, we did act on the suggestion and talked to quite a large
number of employees. We were not surprised to find that they, indeed,
weren't too happy about their circumstances, but they needed the jobs and
were not anxious to quit. Strangely enough, when we asked them what they thought
of their bosses, almost unanimously and without much hesitation, they said that
their bosses were "JERKS!" In a recent survey, employees of a
high-tech aerospace manufacturer were asked, "What is keeping you from
achieving your goals at work?" The clear-cut majority of respondents said
that it was "management and team leaders" who were the source of their
problems, and the company had too many chiefs.

Adding Misery to Confusion at Work

As part of his introduction to Working, Studs Terkel characterized a
second fierce problem plaguing modern organizations. He said, "This book,
being about work, is, by its very nature, about violenceto the spirit as
well as to the body." Workers sing both the blue-collar blues and the
white-collar moan. The two factors that contribute most to the blues and the
moans are the work itself and the manager.

As Komarovsky so poignantly describes in her account of the Blue-Collar
Marriage, the kind of work one is allowed to do serves as the foundation of
economic deprivations, anxiety about the future, a sense of defeat, and a bleak
existence: "The low status of the job, in addition to low pay and
unfavorable working conditions, is a frequent source of dis-satisfaction....
Daily life is a constant struggle to meet the bills for rent, groceries, a pair
of shoes, a winter coat, and the TV set and the washing machine." For the
white-collar worker, Freudenberger, a prominent psychiatrist, has captured the
dread of work in his impelling treatment of Burn Out: "Many men and
women who come to me in pain report that life seems to have lost its meaning.
Their enthusiasm is gone. They feel uninvolved, even in the midst of family and
friends. Their jobs, which used to mean so much, have become drudgery with no
associated feeling of reward." Exhaustion from intense mental
concentration, long hours in routine and repetitive tasks, and constant changes
in tasks already completed lead to cynicism, irritability, paranoia, and
mistrust of others. The demand to achieve more with less and less catapults us
into voids of anguish and precipitates sudden outbursts of emotional energy
designed to relieve us of the pressure of work, work, work.

Ripping Faces Off People

Scott and Hart, prominent authors in organizational theory and philosophy,
place this malaise in the context of the "insignificant people." They
argue that organization members are ruled by a managerial elite who, in order to
maintain their place as rulers, must convince members of the work-force that, in
relationship to the organization, the individual is insignificant.
Workers are told how valuable they are, but they are then treated as invaluable
and told to "quit if you don't like it here." The goal of
managers seems to be to indoctrinate the workforce to understand and accept
their insignificance in relation, particularly, to the superior goals of the
system.

Further, misery and confusion arise because of the need in modern
organizations to educate more members of the workforce to handle the
increasingly more sophisticated demands of their jobs. Thus, even though the
training may be simply technical, it encourages people to think. Thinking tends
to lead people to reflect on the nature of their jobs. As they increase in
technical expertise, they may recognize how dull, routine, and monotonous their
work is and how antiquated the mindset of their bosses really is in this modern
era.

The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging!
Anonymous